1. PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon. PriceZombie indexes products and prices in over 100 online retailers. The developers always had the option of using the PZ website as a front end to gather personal shopping habits and other data that is valuable to advertising and marketing companies - which is what many (most?) price trackers do as their primary source of revenue. PZ opted to get their funding from retailers instead. People purchased mostly from Amazon, therefor when Amazon pulled their affiliate program funding dried up and PZ had a choice - go to the dark side, close up, or sell.
2. They had many contacts, some of them quite high. PZ is a very ethical and methodical company. They dotted their i's and crossed their t's. They had an open dialog with Amazon where they were repeatedly told, in writing and on the phone, that they were in full compliance and there was no problem. The problem with Amazon is inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules.
The developers are in discussions now with companies that want to purchase the technology - including my own, though I don't think we can afford them. This is no garage set up by comp sci students. The developers have impressive credentials and they have created a very impressive system that has wide application to other uses.
Not technically for the reasons you stated. However, it is evident that PriceZombie was financially built on top of Amazon's Affiliate program. It's hard to argue against that when Amazon contributed 90% of revenue
That is dictated by where consumers end up shopping. You can diversify to thousands of stores, but if Amazon is the biggest seller, they will get the lion's share of the click throughs and purchases.
What PZ did was show users who shop at other stores, that Amazon was cheaper, and funnel users to Amazon. Sometimes Amazon wasn't cheaper, but I wonder if this is all about to change.
CCC regurgitates Amazon's own customers back to them. PriceZombie tracks prices on 100+ other stores, they have a Reddit bot that is seen by millions of people every day and they have browser extensions that are used by tens of thousands of people every day. Since Amazon usually has the best price, PZ actually steered customers to Amazon. It is against Reddit's TOS to have affiliate links in bots and against the TOS of most retailers to have affiliate links in extensions - so a massive amount of business was pushed Amazon's way without any benefit to PriceZombie.
PriceZombie's failure was in not expecting Amazon to always have the best price. Not all of the online retailers they track have affiliate programs so if a few of them dropped out because they were losing business it would not be a big loss, but with 90%+ of all purchases coming from Amazon, losing them as an affiliate was a fatal blow.
But that is to the PZ site. Behind PZ is a massive, custom coded data retrieval and searchable storage system that contains three years worth of product and price data from almost every major online retailer - both the technology and data is far more valuable than the PZ website.
CCC makes money off of Amazon links. Other ways price trackers make money is to sell personal shopping habits, and other data they gather. PriceZombie's developer has always stated they would not do that which is why they relied wholly on affiliate fees.
You miss the point. PriceZombie was above board with what they were doing at all times. Amazon TOLD THEM that as long as their latest price was within 24 hours they could display price history like dozens of other price trackers were doing. PZ was reviewed three times, not just by low level people but higher up in the chain, and each time there was no question they were within the TOS so long as they displayed the current price along with price history. This is why PZ's Reddit bot always pulls up and displays the current price when queried. After three years, Amazon changed their mind - but not for everyone, just PZ.
Many of the shoppers using Price Zombie likely relied on Price Zombie's historical pricing data and notifications of price drops to delay purchases until prices for items were relatively low. The affiliate link gave Amazon data on which shoppers were using Price Zombie. Maybe someone at Amazon used their data to estimate the decrease in margins from that, causing Amazon's leadership to change its mind.
Exactly. I also deal with Amazon on a seller's platform and can confirm this. It doesn't matter who you know, the company itself is bipolar and unreliable.
As a fellow third party seller on Amazon - I am astonished by how dysfunctional and unreliable Amazon is. I cant imagine relying on FBA for my main source of income because Amazon is so fickle. For example - I have had an item in reserve [1] in their warehouse since Jan 18th!! I opened a case about it on March 4th (for those following along, that's three full weeks ago...). They just keep saying "we've contacted the warehouse and will get back to you if they can find it or not." Apparently I'm supposed to accept that items I send them are unable to be purchased for over 2 months?
It wouldn't be a big deal if this was an isolated incident but it's not.
But people continue to sell on Amazon because that is where the customers are.
[1] Reserve means an item is unable to be bought, either because it's in reserve for a customer order that hasn't shipped or its being transferred to another warehouse.
2. They had many contacts, some of them quite high. PZ is a very ethical and methodical company. They dotted their i's and crossed their t's. They had an open dialog with Amazon where they were repeatedly told, in writing and on the phone, that they were in full compliance and there was no problem. The problem with Amazon is inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules.
The developers are in discussions now with companies that want to purchase the technology - including my own, though I don't think we can afford them. This is no garage set up by comp sci students. The developers have impressive credentials and they have created a very impressive system that has wide application to other uses.